MooBella has put Linux to work making ice cream, in a vending machine that Wallace and Gromit would be proud of. The MooBella vending machine uses Linux 2.4 and a Red Hat filesystem to make 96 varieties of ice cream, on demand, in about 45 seconds.

The machine has a 15-inch flat-panel LCD interface, with a touchscreen overlay that customers use to choose their flavor. The machine can be stocked with up to two “base mixes,” 12 flavor mixes, and three dry-ingredient mix-ins, enabling it to produce the 96 different varieties.

Once the customer's selection has been made, a quantity of base mix is precisely measured and pumped, aerated, flavored, and sprayed onto a flat rotating surface, where it is flash frozen. The product is then scraped up by a tiny snowplow, formed into a cylinder, and dispensed into a paper cup.

Unlike soft-serve ice cream machines, MooBella creates real ice cream to customer specifications, the company says. The machine consumes MooBella's proprietary formulas, which are packaged aseptically using “bag-in-a-box” technology that requires no refrigeration until the bags are opened.

Read all about the MooBella — and its embedded Linux software — in our complete Device Profile: